“I have had sudden visions.”
Bloor Street, Toronto, 1934
3 a.m. in the all-night diner, dizzy
with Benzedrine and lack of sleep, old books
and papers scattered across the table.
With his pen, his Dickensian spectacles,
his pounding, driving Bourgeois intellect,
he charges into a poem by William Blake
with two facts and a thesis, cuts Milton
open on the table like a murdered corpse
and spins it like a teetotum until
he’s put each sentence through its purgatory
and made the poet bless him with a sign:
thus (though perhaps one can picture this
only from a point outside of time)
he sees the shattered universe around him
explode in reverse, and make the flying
shards of its blue Rose window whole again.
James Pollock grew up in southern Ontario and earned an MA and PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston, where he held several fellowships in poetry. He was a John Woods Scholar in poetry at the Prague Summer Program at Charles University in Prague, and a work-study scholar in poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His poems have been published in AGNI, The Paris Review, Poetry Daily, and more than a dozen other journals, and his book of poems, Sailing to Babylon, was published by Able Muse Press in 2012. His critical reviews have appeared in Contemporary Poetry Review, Books in Canada, The New Quarterly, and elsewhere, and a collection of his criticism, You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada, is forthcoming from The Porcupine’s Quill. He is an associate professor at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, where he teaches poetry in the creative writing program. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin. (updated 7/2012)